This invention relates to an electronic musical instrument and, more particularly, to an automatic performing apparatus of an electronic musical instrument which reads out musical performance information stored on an appropriate recording medium and generates musical tone signals according to the musical performance information.
An automatic performing apparatus of this type is provided with a memory to store musical performance information which has been read out of the recording medium. The memory successively stores musical note data including pitch data and duration data for musical notes in accordance with progression of a music to be played. Musical note data are successively read out of the memory at time intervals corresponding to note durations, and then musical tone signals having pitches represented by pitch data read out of the memory are produced. Such an automatic performing apparatus may be provided with an auto rhythm playing device, and the note duration is measured by tempo clock pulses used for rhythm generation. An example of such apparatus is disclosed in a copending United States Patent Application Ser. No. 217,896 filed Dec. 18, 1980, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,364,299, and assigned to the same assignee as this application.
With such an automatic performing apparatus, if the pitch data and duration data of the respective musical notes are stored in the memory according to the progression of a music, then the storage capacity of the memory must be inevitably increased as the length of the music increases.
There is a case that, in performing a music, a pitch pattern as a combination of some pitches and/or a duration pattern as a combination of some durations appear repeatedly. If the information of repeatedly appearing patterns are stored, as subroutine data, into a data memory, the capacity of the memory can considerably be saved.